Some information for your speech might be found in
The Framing of the Constitution of the United States by Max
Farrand, in The American Constitution, For and Against by J.R.
Pole. And others. Maybe your school librarian can borrow a suitable book for your
project through Interlibrary Loan. Or maybe you can visit a nearby university
library.
Some of the issues that were
debated:
1) Whether members of the House of Representatives
should be elected from small districts so that every voter would know who he was voting
for, or whether it was good to have large districts so that representatives who were so
capable that their reputation was well known over a wide area would be
elected.
2) Whether the federal government should be able
to get all the money it wanted by taxing citizens directly or whether the federal
government should have to get all of its money by requesting grants from the state
governments; in the latter case, the states would place limits upon how much the federal
government could spend.
3)Whether federal courts should be
able to rule on all kinds of cases and overturn the rulings of state courts, or whether
federal courts should be able to rule only upon cases that the federal government was a
party to and all other cases should be held in state courts, and the federal courts
should not be able to overrule state courts.
4) Whether the
Constitution gave so much power to the federal government, that whoever held the reigns
of power in the federal government would be virtually a tyrant and the people would not
be free, or whether the Constitution so much limited what the federal government could
do that it could never be a threat to freedom.
5) Whether
the Constitution effectively abolished the state governments and placed all
governmentmental power in the federal government, or whether the state governments
retained the most of their powers and only a few powers were assigned to the federal
government (such as war and diplomacy).
And so
on.
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